Transcendentalism: 1836-1860 "We are symbols, and inhabit symbols": Proto-Beatnik Ralph Waldo Emerson succinctly described the Transcendentalist sense of honoring the spiritual within the material. Emerson, a die-hard nonconformist, was the brainchild behind this mid-19th century group of American philosophers and writers.... [more]

Transcendentalism: 1836-1860 "We are symbols, and inhabit symbols": Proto-Beatnik Ralph Waldo Emerson succinctly described the Transcendentalist sense of honoring the spiritual within the material. Emerson, a die-hard nonconformist, was the brainchild behind this mid-19th century group of American philosophers and writers. Inflamed by scathingly contemptuous English artists of the so-called 'progress' wrought by the Industrial Revolution, Transcendentalists hosted weekly gatherings, plotting to overthrow scientific rationalism by leading the contemplative life. Mystics, mediums, or madmen -- Transcendentalists absorbed the jeers of an uncomprehending Victorian mentality that attempted to straitjacket their forays into spiritualism, mysticism, and the divinity of man, big ideological no-no's of the day. With the publication of Emerson's Nature (1836) and Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), the first gauntlet was thrown in the fight against modern materialism Transcendentalists detested organized religion, but more importantly, they revered nature as the embodiment of spiritual reality. Emerson's theories inspired Walt Whitman's ecstatic poetry of a joyous soul in the "body electric." In "Leaves of Grass," Whitman forged free verse from distilled lines of the Old Testament. The Transcendentalists envisioned nature as literal manifestation of a Supreme Mind or Over-Soul. Transcendental mysticism reverberated in such later writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and of course, and most famously, the Beat Movement. [show less]